A series of flooding disasters in India this year is a wake-up call for people to rethink their relationship with water, and the key to doing so lies in looking at the country’s ancient history and religions.

That’s the theme of a new book by two Bengaluru-based ecologists, Harini Nagendra and Seema Mundoli. The book, Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India’s Cities, comes at a time of heightened concern over the impact of climate change on weather patterns in South Asia. In recent weeks, a glacial lake overflowed and burst through a dam in the northeastern India state of Sikkim, killing at least 40 people, while weeks of heavy rainfall across Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand in the north killed about 350 people.